Did you ever stop to consider the wide variety of subjects and viewpoints covered by the millions of blogs that are written each week? In the United States, practically no subject is taboo. American’s have the luxury of utilizing the Internet to speak their minds freely without worrying about the repercussions of their words or worrying that the words themselves may be censored. American bloggers have this freedom specifically because of our First Amendment Right.
In America we are granted certain freedoms, freedoms that many citizens across the world do not have. With few exceptions, American’s are allowed to say what they want, what they mean and what think. It is this freedom that has allowed the world of blogging to explode in the United States.
Imagine, if you will, a world in which we were not allowed to express ourselves this freely. It would be, perhaps, a world in which the government would have the power, and would utilize that power, to turn the Internet off when its citizens were writing blogs or Internet posts that were consider anti-government. A world that is so diametrically opposed to freedom of speech, expression and of the press that its citizens are unable to say what they mean.
The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights may have been written to allow our forefathers to express their views in newspapers, but today it is utilized in ways that its writers could not possibly conceived of. The First Amendment allows today’s American citizens to write, post and comment on blogs that honestly represent their viewpoints, however unpopular, about everything from politics to the economy and everything in between.
It is unlikely that those who wrote the First Amendment could have possibly understood just how far reaching it would become. They, of course, knew they were protecting our ability to speak freely, they just didn’t realize how digital that right would eventually become.